VMware Host Groups, VM Groups and Rules

The Microsoft licensing agreements are made based on the number of processor cores (or sockets) that are in use by the physical or virtual hosts that make use of Microsoft software. The Microsoft licensing allows for a VMware ESXi host’s CPUs (or cores) to be licensed instead of the vCPU (virtual CPUs) of each virtual … Read more

Example AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB)

The AWS application load balancer is a key infrastructure component for providing access to your application to the Internet, or even for use within your VPC between components. In this example we’ll create a VPC, then within deploy 2 private and 2 public subnets, we’ll then attach an Internet Gateway, a NAT gateway (to allow … Read more

Installing a Specific Ruby Version

We needed to install Ruby 2.7 instead of what normally comes with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, if we installed a later than 2.7 Ruby version, the particular application (i.e. Staytus in this case) would barf. The nice people at BrightBox have created some packaged installs of Ruby at various versions.https://www.brightbox.com/docs/ruby/ubuntu/#adding-the-repositoryhttps://launchpad.net/~brightbox/+archive/ruby-ng (Latest version supported 20.04) We first … Read more

Microsoft Exchange 2016 – How to Fix Exchange DAG Witness Failed State

In certain situations the Exchange DAG witness can become a problem, this can occur during an upgrade or can happen if there is a network interruption. Although the DAG will continue to operate the witness is considered failed, which can cause odd behaviour in a failover scenario, as there is no quorum available for the … Read more

Retrieve HPE Server iLO Licence Key

You can retrieve the HPE ilO Licence key from your existing iLO, perhaps you’ve had a failure of the motherboard and need to get the key out because you’ll be replacing the motherboard due to a fault with a new one and need the key out so you can re-enter it. Firstly login to the … Read more

Getting Started with AWS Cloudformation

AWS Cloudformation is a tool and declaritive language you can use to declare what you want your “stack” (i.e. your deployment of AWS resources) to look like. You define all the resources you want AWS to spin up in a blueprint document, click a button, and then AWS magically creates it all. This blueprint is … Read more